Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:03 Hello everyone. Welcome to BRI Blocks. This is the sixth episode of the series of Bri Blocks on discomfort that we started together with editors one and Maria, who are here with me. I am Maria. I'll be one of your hosts today. Thank you everyone that has been listening to this constantly. We know that it has been taking a few months of your, of developing and like, kind of building up on the ideas of the ideas on discomfort and how they relate to special practices. Hello. <unk>
Speaker 2 00:00:32 Hello.
Speaker 1 00:00:35 <unk> Hello.
Speaker 2 00:00:36 Hello everyone. So today we have Sidra with us. Si, Sidra. Camran. So Sidra is a sociologist and we are very excited to have today a sociologist. We've had so far architects, uh, urbanists. We had last week an artist. We had a psychologist, and today we have enlarging our perspectives and we have CiDRA who, as I just said, is a sociologist. She holds a PhD in sociology from the new school for social research, uh, New York. And she's currently an assistant professor of sociology, uh, at Louis and Clark College in Portland. Uh, Sidra, just to give you a bit of information about our guest today, Sidra was born and raised in Karahi Pakistan. And her research, uh, that uses ethnographic and interview methods studies urban life in its relationship to labor, gender and class in the south of Asia. We have invited Sidra today to talk a bit about her research that as is currently developing as a book, right?
Speaker 2 00:01:43 All women, beauty and retail workers in Pakistan, in the context of Pakistan's transition to a service economy and the persisting taboos on women's participation, the public space, but more broadly in the public sphere and more specifically, uh, on the special practices that these workers have developed, uh, and that in a certain way unveiled or bring to light a more general question in my per, in my own perspective, I think, uh, your research brings a very interesting question and broader question about the arbitrary of the distinction between public and private spaces. And in a certain way it questions the bja and Eurocentric nature of public space that we tend to have from a very liberal perspective, uh, public space as this space of encounter and recognition and, you know, and commodified, conviviality, uh, politic, partici political participation where we are all equal. So, um, so I just wanted to start by asking you about your research to give us a bit some of your, of the results of your investigation, of your research, and, uh, to tell us a bit about what did you find in relation to the experience of, uh, workers, the experience of the city that, uh, workers, women workers in Karachi, uh, have.
Speaker 3 00:03:05 Sure. Thank you for inviting me to this podcast. Um, I can talk a little bit. So my research focuses on women beauty and retail workers, right? And this occupation is interesting to me because, uh, Pakistan's female labor force participation rate is very low. So it's only 23% of women in the workforce in the paid workforce. And these women who are entering beauty and retail jobs in urban centers, they're entering very public facing jobs in an arena where women are not supposed to be in the public sphere. So I broadly look at their labor practices, their leadership practices, you know, how they engage in new forms of urban life, how they make relationships and encounters with people who are not from their family. And what I'm really interested in, because I'm a sociologist at work, so I really think about the workplace, and one of the things that I find is, um, that the workplace, the workplace kind of troubles our binaries of public and private, as you were saying.
Speaker 3 00:04:05 So, you know, when we think of public spaces, uh, we think about cinemas, parks, even malls, um, the street. And when we think of private spaces, we think of the home. And the workplace is oftentimes considered a private place because it's not accessible to everyone. It's regulated by managerial oversight. There are certain forms of disciplining that occur there, but I find in my research that for these women, beauty and retail workers who are mostly working class women who do not have access to your traditional kinds of public space such as malls, cinemas, the street parks, because there's such a taboo on women being in public spaces, especially for purposes of leisure, that the workplace becomes for them a kind of public space. So, you know how you were saying we associate the work, uh, the public spaces with, um, fun or the ability to be who you really are or to exercise a kind of, uh, you know, relationship with strangers, all of these avenues that we think the public space opens up for us, right?
Speaker 3 00:05:08 And in my research, I find that these beauty and, uh, retail workers are using the workplace in similar ways. And then what I try to argue is that the workplace becomes a kind of in between public private place. And I'm not at all suggesting that the workplace is a kind of utopian public space, and everyone should be advocating for, you know, women should be being who they're in the workplace. Yeah, but I'm just saying that when we think in rigid categories of public and private, we don't even consider the workplace, right? So sociologists of urban life look at a lot of places, but not the workplace often. And then sociologists of work, they look at the workplace, but they don't situate the workplace in the broader context of urban life. So I'm really interested in thinking about how these women are navigating the city, but through the workplace.
Speaker 2 00:05:55 Yeah. So there are these, there, there are these very interesting, I have two questions for you, <laugh>. So one of them has to do with how I found really interesting, um, how you elaborate on the temporalities, this sort of in between temporalities that appear between the workspace and the domestic space for, uh, workers in retail and beauty in Karachi. Well, for the, your research, um, and how this spaces become sort of, uh, yeah, this in between, uh, I don't know if you can call it space of freedom, but somehow I got the impression that it is an specialty that in temporal terms, because it is moving from one place to another allows, uh, a form of freedom from the op, as you were saying, from the oppressive disciplinary managerial environment of work and the, the patriarchal, uh, domestic space. So yeah, if you could tell us a bit about that.
Speaker 2 00:07:04 And I'm also curious on, and I'm going, just going to throw the question right away. I don't know much about the topic. So the, the beats I know come from, I would say a seminal text on that studies the relationship of gender or women in, uh, south Asia in regards to public space. And is the why loiter the book, um, from 2011 and what is the influence in a certain way that that seminal text, uh, has on your own work, um, to to to give an account of the Yeah. The, the, yeah, to give an account of the <laugh>.
Speaker 3 00:07:45 Yeah, these are great questions. So I think to answer the first one, it might be useful to talk just a little bit about what exactly the patriarchal restrictions on women's participation in the public sphere are. So, you know, it's, uh, Pakistan is a society in which we practice gender segregation. So that means that you women are often secluded spatially. So in the home there might be a woman's section, a zana or you know, workplaces. There might be, so one of the field sites that I study is a women only bazaar, wo men cannot enter that space. Um, you have women only educational institutions, women only transport, uh, it's really common to seclude women physically, but you also have practices of veiling in which women may, um, practice another kind of seclusion, and men are encouraged to veil with their eyes. So this is an everyday reality of how public spaces are structured in Pakistan. So public spaces are never actually accessible to women as this space of free and equal political participation, or even for free and equal leisure, right? Because there's always the segregation happening.
Speaker 3 00:08:53 But at the same time, the home is also an oppressive place, right? It's not that women can just be who they are. So it might be gender oppression in which, um, the patriarchs of the family will often control women's mobility and women's embodiment and women's speech, right? Um, it's also class oppression in which women may be sharing a room with five of their siblings and sleeping in the same room with their parents. So it's not exactly that they can be talking to their friends or their boyfriends on the phone at night, right? Yeah. So the home is also not a place where you can be who you are in your intimate private self. So what I look at is, and to go to your point about the temporal or the gap between the workplace and the home, well women do very strategically is they learn to make the best of the gaps between what we may call home discipline and work discipline.
Speaker 3 00:09:43 So if they're working women, they use the home to, um, in a different way. So for example, if you're working, your sister might make you breakfast, or your mother and sister might do more of the social reproduction work. So your status as a working woman might help you escape some of that. Uh, but then when you go to work, you are not really under the surveillance of your parents, although you are under the surveillance of your manager. You can maybe, you know, go to work early and then talk to your boyfriend on the phone at work when your boss isn't there yet. Yeah. So this has been a very interesting play of exploiting the gap between the two. Then there's a question of the actual temporal gap of going to work, right? So I often found that women are not really allowed to go anywhere in the city, but when they have to go to work, their parents and their brothers and their husbands will make an exception, and they say, okay, for work, you can go because they need to earn money.
Speaker 3 00:10:33 So sometimes, you know, brothers and husbands will drop the women to work to really surveil them on route, but oftentimes that's not possible. So then what women will do is they will try to stretch the time between home and work. So they may say to their parents and their husbands that we have to stay late at work, but they may leave work early and they may go out for dinner, and they may may go out to the mall and they may hang out with their friends. So there's a kind of exploiting the temporal gap between going to work and, uh, you know, going back home. And there's a lot of this, and I think that's, you know, there's a rich history of, uh, gender studies in Saudi Asia, which constantly show how intuitive it is for women to strategically move through the city, move through different systems of oppression.
Speaker 3 00:11:17 So I think once we abandon this ideal of, you know, public space, um, and another author who writes on Pakistan servant vicar, she makes this point to say, once we stop thinking of public space as a space of unfettered mobility, right, as this ideal, then we can become attuned to all of these kinds of practices in which people are just manipulating space to suit their own interests. And of course, time in the sense too, uh, to answer your second question, I think that this book, why Loiter has, has been, you know, it's just been foundational for so many people working in gender studies. And I think that I didn't really start at this project with a specific desire to study space, but because as a feminist, I was really shaped by this text, right? So this text, it asked this question, why loiter? And it's basically a text that makes this point that women are not only denied entry into public space in general in South Asia.
Speaker 3 00:12:14 And this is not just a Pakistan issue, right? The authors of this book are writing about India, but there is this additional taboo that women cannot be in public spaces for purposes of leisure. So they cannot loiter, they cannot just be in public space without a reason. If a woman is in public space, she has to be waiting for the bus. She has to be running an errand. She has to be, you know, shopping for her kids. She has to be going to work. And the demand that the book makes is that that is not the only reason women should be in public space. Women should have access to be in public space just to loiter without a purpose. And the book actually led, um, resulted in, in a lot of social movements, feminist movements around this issue of loitering. So women started napping in public parks to make a claim to public space, right?
Speaker 3 00:13:06 Uh, women started, um, yeah, I love that. In Pakistan, there's a group that started around 2015 by, uh, a group of young women called Girls at Haas. Uh, the Haas are very, um, uh, they're tea stalls usually by the side of the road, but they're also, they're not your elite or middle class cafes. They're your more working class ordinary, just, you know, chairs by the side of the road. And those spaces are predominantly just occupied by men. So it is becoming increasingly common for middle class women to go to cafes in these, you know, new kinds of malls. And elite women can go unaccompanied by men to these, uh, cafes and upscale restaurants, but it's not typical for them to go to these Haass that are on the street. So this group inspired by this book, they started going to these tabs and taking photos of themselves in these spaces and uploading them on tamla.
Speaker 3 00:14:02 They're called Girls at Haas. And, and it was really a, it was really a rupture in the idea of public space because they were saying, we can actually be here just having a cup of tea like anyone else. So I'm, I, I, of course, as a woman in Pakistan was similarly struggling with these issues of access to space, right? So you can say, of course, you know, I study class, and class does shape one's access to the space, of course. But these taboos around participation in the public sphere, these exi, these influence women across the class spectrum, right? So it's not that only working class women are affected by this. So because this book was in my, in my mind, and it had been such an important feminist movement for all of us, I think that made me really attentive to these issues of space.
Speaker 3 00:14:52 And one of the critiques of this, these feminist movements and girls at haba has been that these movements have been middle class women's movements. So a lot of people, you know, have lash onto to this argument that, well, working class women are already in public space because they have to go to work. So these are just bour women who are making this claim, and they're making this issue because bourgeois women. And, and it is true that bourgeois women do have a certain claim and, um, ability, privilege, yeah, privilege to claim respectability. They actually can afford to just go to these upscale indoor, uh, salons and malls, and they actually don't go out to use public transport the same way that working class women do. But it became this interesting issue in which the desire to loiter, which I interpreted as a desire to have pleasure, became a concern of middle class women.
Speaker 3 00:15:46 And all of these righteous men, including progressive men, said, well, this is not what working class women are concerned with, right? This is what middle class women are concerned with. And I find in my research, and of course we know this without doing research, that it is not just middle class women that are concerned with pleasure. Everyone is concerned with pleasure, right? Yeah. Working class women are also concerned with pleasure. They may not, you know, frame their desire in these terms, but they are struggling with similar issues around specialty. And then I find that, um, even if these women are not, you know, posting photos of themselves at Havas, uh, beauty and retail workers are going to have us with their friends. It is a moment of joy. And actually it was really interesting to me to see how they were going in women only groups at 11, uh, pm at night after the late night shift, which is quite transgressive in the local context, right?
Speaker 3 00:16:39 So it became a way for me to think about what a working class woman's perspective on this debate of loitering and public spaces would look like. Of course, I regret at the moment, I didn't directly ask them to comment on this movement, or I didn't directly ask them about these issues. Um, but I did observe how they moved through the city, and I spent a lot of time with them, you know, moving, going out with them, uh, hanging out at the workplace, going to their homes. So I kind of patched together my observations of how they navigated these spaces. And the workplace became a really central place through which they accessed the city. So if they weren't going to work, it's not that they could go to a haba, but because they were going to work in the first place, it became a launching pad through which they accessed other spaces of the city.
Speaker 4 00:17:31 Oh, thank you, sir. I think that, um, your approach, it's also, or brings to question some, something like beyond in terms of the malls or these beauty spaces, thinking about not necessarily the consumer, but the worker, like the people who move, um, around and provide those services, which I think is fascinating. And, and I was partly, you answered that in the la in the in before, just before. Like I, I've been very curious to ask you about what brought you to this work to, and particularly to the beauty aspect of it.
Speaker 3 00:18:10 So I think what, I mean, a number of things brought me to this work, but one or two of the things I can share is that one, very early on I became interested in work. I was just really interested in this issue of work. I just thought it was an inescapable issue, especially around gender and work. And I was looking for something, you know, thinking about something to do with work. But even before that, I suppose, you know, as I said, I grew up in Karachi and I saw this happen in, in front of me, sort of how popular beauty salons became. And, and I saw this happen. So I have a close friend who is from a, a middle class family who, whose parents whose mother certainly never went to beauty salons regularly. And I didn't expect her to go. But when she started earning money, she started going quite regularly to get her nails done.
Speaker 3 00:18:57 And I remember being, I remember noticing this generational difference, and this was happening to a lot of women around me. Um, and beauty salons were becoming very popular. And as there was this kind of explosion of beauty salons across the city and also of these new kinds of retail sites, and the place that I became initially fascinated by is a women only bazaar called Mina Bazaar in Karachi. It's really a one of a kind, I haven't been able to find another bazaar like that in the world. And what makes it special is that it's a baar of only beauty salons and lingerie shops. So there are like these tiny, tiny 300 or something and that's all sell, and it's not fancy lingerie. So it's under undergarments, you can say. And it's these small beauty salons and sometimes they're just six feet by four feet. So you have one chair in the beauty salon and it's not your, you know, when we think of beauty salon or we would, you know, the idealized representation of a beauty salon with the candlelight and the soothing sounds and the dim lighting and the spy effect, it is not like that.
Speaker 3 00:20:00 It is very chaotic, it is quite energetic. It is not
Speaker 2 00:20:04 Colombian, all of us. So I think we know what type of, what type of <laugh> what type of salon you're talking about <laugh>,
Speaker 3 00:20:13 Right? It it, and the interesting thing is that it's also open, you know, so we think of beauty salons as these private spaces, but most of these beauty salons, they only have three walls and they open directly onto the alleyways of the bazaar. And what makes it special is that there are only women who work there and there are only women who may enter their shop. So it's this women only space. And, and what I was initially interested was I grew up in the city. It's not just segregated across gender lines, but it is extremely segregated around class lines, right? So there are spaces where there are middle, middle class upperclass women go and there are spaces where, you know, uh, working class women may go and the beauty salon as a workplace sort of troubles some of that class distinction, right? Cuz you have an intermittent encounter across class positions.
Speaker 3 00:20:59 So working class women catering to middle class women. But what I like about this bizarre was that it was truly one rare space where you had women from a large spectrum of class geographic ethnic backgrounds. So it became a, a public space in the way that it was just a mixture of all these different, you know, um, subject positions. And I was really fascinated by that. Of course, you know, you may think of other workplaces, for example, factories may also have, uh, you know, uh, different subject positions. But factories often employ workers who live in the close by neighborhoods, right? Because it's easier for women workers or to commute to those factories. But Mina Bazaar was attracting women from all across the city, and I was really interested in finding an urban space that was an exception to how we usually think of these stratified and segregated urban spaces.
Speaker 3 00:21:55 So that, you know, coupled with my interest in work, I decided to study beauty work and I decided particularly to focus on your low scale or neighborhood salons. Cuz I wasn't very interested in, in upscale salons, particularly because I wanted to think about what working class, women's perspective on, on contemporary debates around gender might be. And then I added another field site to my work, which is a retail store. And this is also a new kind of retail store, actually, I'd be curious to know if this is something in Columbia. But you know, when we think of department stores in the context of the US I think we, it's more elite. So it's department stores selling all these brands. What we have now in Pakistan are these department stores that are often sourcing goods from China. So there's one department store, you can buy clothes and gifts and toys and dishes and shoes, um, makeup, all in that store, but it's not catering to elite consumers.
Speaker 3 00:22:55 So it's catering to your lower middle class or even working class. So some of the beauty and retail workers would also shop at these stores. And again, it becomes a space which sort of expands the type of people who are shopping and working. And, and this was a mixed gender space. So I included that as another space to think about not just labor, but how these spaces work in relation to broader urban life and also service as spaces of leisure. I look a little bit at consumers, but I focus mostly at on workers. So, and, and then my last interest I guess that really brought, brought me to choose sites is always an issue of class. And I think beauty in retail workers are interesting to think about in terms of class because they are not your traditional working class, whatever that may be. But you know, you have the stereotype of a domestic worker or a factory worker or a home-based worker.
Speaker 3 00:23:49 They're not that exactly. Also because even if their class economic class is a working class, they can perform a middle class embodiment and compartment because of their jobs. In fact, their jobs often require them to do that. So I think they trouble our idea of the working class, but they're also not your traditional middle class respectable woman who stays at home or who is a teacher because these occupations are quite stigmatized. Women are associated with sex work. Women beauty workers, especially women, retail workers often have to wear western clothes like pants and a blazer or wear makeup. So they're stigmatized. So it's this interesting thing. These jobs are very popular if you need a job, you don't need, uh, to have a training or educational qualification to get this job. But they're also very stigmatized. So these occupations just became really fascinating to me because it troubles so many of our binaries, right? Public, private labor, leisure, working class, middle class, good, bad. Are these good women? Are these bad women? How do they perceive themselves? How are they perceived? So these are some of the interests that, um, still make motivate me to work on this project. But now I feel I've been working on it for a while. Um,
Speaker 1 00:25:05 I think, I mean, just to maybe go back to this kind of line that we have between all the podcasts that we have been recording, but, uh, it's this idea of discomfort and of course public space or like public sphere in a way, uh, with very specific bodies and gendered or rationalized bodies tends to be a place of tensions of course. And that's why we came to this idea of, uh, of discomfort and like discussing ideas of, uh, of discomfort and space. So yeah, maybe, I don't know if you can share with us like some ideas of that you have been like kind of pointing out within your research, uh, about this, about like discomfort and how what have you been? Yeah. Like how, what you've been finding basically that can connect a little bit to this bigger overarching thing that we have.
Speaker 3 00:25:50 Yeah, sure. So I think one of the things that's interesting to think about in terms of discomfort and comfort is that I don't think that for these women, and maybe we can even extrapolate this beyond, beyond the beauty and retail workers that I'm studying, that comfort exists in any space or that is possible to achieve this unadulterated, pure form of comfort. Or, or let's rephrase this another way, maybe it is, but it doesn't have much to do with space itself. Like comfort or the idea of achieving comfort might be located somewhere else. Because what, as I was saying earlier, right? This home can be an oppressive space. The workplace can be an oppressive space. I mean, there are public spaces are not openly accessible and equal. So let's say women are in this constant state of discomfort or feeling of friction between who, who they are and where they exist, but they are so adept at finding a place for themselves.
Speaker 3 00:26:51 So if we think about not discomfort and comfort as a binary, which I don't think you do, you are, but as gradations, right? So women are just tactically increasing where they can be comfortable using what resources they can and changing, going somewhere else, inhabiting it in a little bit of a different way. They use their bailing practices very strategically, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And I think one of the things that I, like, one of the researchers, um, Jenna Key Abraham, who writes about a city in Raton bier, she shows that what is considered public and private for women in that town is not the space itself, but who is in the space. So if the woman is in her mother's, you know, natal town, then she doesn't wail in the same way as she would veil in the town or in the, in the neighborhood where she has been married, right?
Speaker 3 00:27:45 So I think I like the idea of thinking about who else is in this space versus what the space exactly is. Is it public or is it private? So drawing the line from comfort and discomfort, uh, not just to the space, but to who's in the space or maybe who you are and how you're feeling. And then relating to that. I think one of the questions that initially I was trying to avoid, but I think it's quite central in my research, is this issue of women only spaces, right? Yeah. So this came up all the time, especially when I was in Minna Bazaar, which is the women-only space. Women would say things like, oh, we feel like this is just like our home. I feel so comfortable here. It's great to work in a women-only space. There were all these positive valuations, which you can infer to mean that women were more comfortable in women only spaces, right?
Speaker 3 00:28:37 And, and that was certainly true. Uh, women would be lounging around, women would let go of some of the norms of respectability, so they would behave in this public space of the Mina bazaar in ways they would never behave in other public spaces, right? So, you know, loudly yelling, do you want a bra? What kind of bra do you want? You know, just on the street of a bazaar is not something a woman would do in a non, uh, in a mixed gender baar, right? So sure we have this idea that women may feel more comfortable in women only spaces, but I also, you know, pushed back a it a bit, and maybe this was my own kind of concern that I bought to it <laugh>, but I wanted to think about is it really the case that you're just going to be more comfortable if you're in a women-only space?
Speaker 3 00:29:22 And then as I was analyzing my data and thinking about it, and I don't think this is, you know, a mind blowing revelation, but I think it's important to put in the context of all these discussions of women only spaces. If you are in a workplace and your boss is there, and if you know she's a woman, but she's disciplining you and she's controlling how you talk to your coworkers, it's not that you're comfortable in that women only space, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative> work discipline, even if enforced by a woman manager, changes your experience of comfort in the space. So to give you an example, I was interviewing a beauty worker in a more upscale salon. And this question I often ask people, so do you feel, do you prefer to work in a women-only space? Or I would ask, um, how do you think you behave in a women-only space?
Speaker 3 00:30:12 And, and this woman she shared with me, no, when there are customers in the salon, it's just like any other interaction, even though these are women customers, right? So she said, yeah, when we're talking to the customers, it's just like, if you were waiting at the telephone office to pay your bill, you know, or work waiting to interact with anyone else. But then in the kitchen, when it's just us coworkers, then it's just, you know, an intimate zone. We're laughing, we're joking with ourselves. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So, so I just wanted to point out that even in this idea of women only spaces, right? There are further gradations. And I don't think that by equation between women only space equals to comfort. It is so, um, so obvious. It is interesting to think why women often claim that, right? So, sure. I'm not saying they don't feel comfortable in women-only spaces, but they're also reinforcing a cultural value because to present yourself as a good woman, you have to prefer to work in a women-only space, right?
Speaker 3 00:31:16 Yeah. But once you start looking at all these gradations within women-only spaces, managerial control, work, discipline, uh, the absence and presence of customers, then you move the debate further. So as a feminist, for example, right now they're just included a women-only bus system in Karachi. There are some buses that are women only, and this happens periodically. They will always have some transport system. And I think this is a very alive debate about whether we should be pushing for more women only things because women prefer that, or women feel more comfortable or they're safer in terms of sexual harassment, or we should be making other kinds of claims. And I, I'm still thinking about some of these, but I think that at least some of my research troubles the very neat equation between women only and automatic comfort. And I try to draw out the role of managerial discipline and customer surveillance, right? Cause customers also surveil workers and interactive service workplaces to show there's nothing automatic about women. Only spaces is naturally more comfortable for women.
Speaker 4 00:32:20 Yeah. Well, did you say something about, yeah, it's very fascinating and how, and how they are not gradients both related to spatial, but like situations like condition bike barriers by different variables of who they are with even, you know, like Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:32:44 I think also
Speaker 2 00:32:45 In the sense many layers, <laugh>, we all want to say something. <laugh>
Speaker 4 00:32:50 Just finished. I don't have skin.
Speaker 2 00:32:53 No. But it make me think to also in the sense that, you know, comfort and discomfort are not just given. They are relational. They're relational. Relational. You can only feel uncomfortable or comfortable or let's say you can only feel, feel uncomfortable because you can see that someone else is in the position of comfort. Otherwise it, the the, the experience itself wouldn't, wouldn't exist, you know? Yeah. So it, it does not depend on the materiality of the space, so to say, but on the configuration of relationships and how that shapes
Speaker 4 00:33:27 Shape the space,
Speaker 2 00:33:28 The borders. Yeah. Space and the bodies, you know, the Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:33:32 Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2 00:33:33 That's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:33:35 And also, I mean, maybe just thinking about temporalities, that is also something that was brought at some point in the conversation. But, um, if thinking only on public about public space, like how complicated idea a public is and how public really is just like this, uh, concept that is just instrumentalized for certain things, but not really. There is not something that we actually experience as a, this very democratic situation. Yeah. But temporalities or different temporalities happening in what we conceive as public space do create moments that are public in itself. Like, for example, a protests. So I think that there is something there that adds like a lot of other layers in terms of, um, or what it implies in the way we use it and we considere it directly connected to time.
Speaker 3 00:34:21 Yeah. I think that's really helpful for me. So I always worry when I make this kind of argument that, you know, we need to think differently about public spaces. That feminist who are very much fighting for a public space will not be amenable to this argument because it serves the interest to use public space as a demand writer, right? To the city, right. To public space. Yeah. So I was worried about sort of deflating that demand by saying, well, what is really public? But I think you are framing about the time helps to retain what is public or what is desirable and how that may be created. But also leave room for sort of questioning the flatter idea of what is public.
